Review – The Missing – Chris Mooney

31Jul

The MissingAuthor: Chris MooneySeries: Book 1 in the Darby McCormick series

Narrator: Bernadette DunneRun Time: 8hrs 23 minutes

Book Description:
Darby McCormack was in high school when she first encountered the killer: someone murdered a woman in the woods where Darby and her two best friends were partying. His race to silence the witnesses was sure-footed and violent – but somehow Darby survived.
Twenty-five years later, Darby is a crime-scene investigator for the Boston Police Department, and a chilling case – a woman’s late-night abduction – has her uncovering strange leads to missing women, past and present. As forensic clues lead her closer to a psychopath called the Traveler, Darby must finally resolve the nightmare of her past and come face-to-face with a killer who is determined to keep the missing – and the horrors they endured at his hands – from ever coming to light.

Review
I likely never would have picked up this book if I hadn’t been playing around with a book recommendation book online. The Missing showed up as a book that readers who enjoyed Shadow Man by Cody MacFayden and since I enjoyed that one, I figured that I would try it. It also worked well because I am making it a goal of mine to try a wider range of audiobook narrators rather than sticking to my tried and true favorites and I had never listened to the narrator before.

Similar to Shadow Man, The Missing focuses on a female mc who has suffered a tragedy in her life – this one when she was a teenager. (But as a random thought, why is it that so many female main characters in these mystery/thriller/suspense books have suffered some kind of massive tragedy that makes them a crusader for good, why can’t they just choose to do that…but that is a thought for another time). Anyways, back to the book – Darby is now a crime scene investigator and solving current crimes as well as the one from her past.

At first I thought I had figured out who the bad guy was going to be, but I completely discounted the person who it turned out to be – you know, one of these days, i’ll start listening to the little voice on my shoulder. I am kind of tempted to re-listen in the future and see if I feel differently.

This was the first time that I had listened to Bernadette Dunne as a narrator and it likely won’t be the last. I felt that she had a good range of vocal inflections for the various voices – but at the same time – the cast of the book was rather limited as compared to other ones I have listened to, so I don’t know how she would have done with a wider range of characters, but I’ll be looking out for more done narrated by her in the future.

but what is sanity?? It just seems like every single one has gone through major trauma – Darby in this book, Smokey Barrett in Cody MacFayden’s, Sara Linton in Karin Slaughter’s (the later books), Jo Beckett in Meg Gardiner’s series…the only ones I can think of that hasn’t is Maura Isles in Tess Gerritsen’s series – but then she is a coroner/pathogist which brings in a whole set of other considerations…

I don’t know if they are suppose to bring depth to the character or show a strength and resilience to a character who has been through so much. It would be refreshing to see a regular woman in the books.